Contributor Erik Bratt argues in the online post that combining data management platforms with tag management is the key to achieving better insights on customer profiles to improve marketing and advertising strategies.

Sales and Marketing departments rely on data to make key decisions on what should be spent on advertising and marketing communications to drive customer conversion rates. However, businesses lack the right data management system to help to collect and organise data, to deliver those valuable data insights for more strategic decisions. Besides the issue of poor data quality, there’s also the matter of its cost – which may run higher than the actual media costs.

Not being able to understand customer data can waste millions in impromptu advertising but also waste man hours on trying pull key data to understand the customers journey to build new strategies, and drive new marketing and communication methods.

A data management system is the key to achieving data-driven marketing; the system will allow multiple departments to have transparency over their customers’ data to keep track of the potential customers, prospects and campaigns efforts so opportunities for an up-sell or cross-sell are not missed again. Businesses that use a data management system will help support sales and marketing activities to enable data to be better organised to reduce waste and improve advertising effectiveness.

By implementing a data management system with tag management controls, sales and marketing departments can better target customers with certain attributes and relevant content based on data findings – rather than targeting everyone the same and creating poor response rates as well as a bad customer experience.

Data-driven marketing can help businesses build more personal messages based on holistic customer profiles that a data management system has gathered and organised. The data collected can alerts departments to activities and campaigns that need interrogating as well as update others on it’s performance.

When it comes to your customer data it is important to not only manage it efficiently and effectively but also analyse the data so you can make informed decisions that will help revenue; simply if you are not analysing customer data, how can you market it?